Merchant

He wants a spare house and he wants to see that somebody has money. The check only looks at coins carried in player inventories, so a Piggy Bank full of gold or a chest of silver counts for nothing. That is the usual reason a player who feels wealthy is still waiting on him. The bar itself is low enough that he is normally the first vendor of a run. Once he has arrived none of it matters anymore: if something kills him he walks back on his own after a while, with no conditions to meet a second time.

The Piggy Bank and the Iron Anvil change what you can do rather than how comfortably you do it, and the anvil in particular saves an entire mining detour if iron has not turned up yet. Rope is the line most people underbuy. It is close to free, and a stack of it turns vertical caving from a fall risk into a staircase. The Mining Helmet is a luxury this early, but it frees a hand and stops you burning through torches. The Bug Net is a gate rather than a tool, since nothing about fishing starts until you can catch your own bait, and the Sickle exists to turn grass into hay for farm animals and furniture.

Much of his inventory is conditional, and it is easy to assume he simply never sold it. Two lines appear only when you already own the matching weapon: Flare once a Flare Gun is in your bag, Nail once you have the Nail Gun. Nothing in the shop hints at either. Others follow the clock and the weather. Throwing knives show up on Blood Moon nights, Glowstick after dark and the rainbow version during a Party, and a Pin Wheel on a windy day. Standing in a snow biome adds marshmallows. There are seed specific oddities too: he will sell a Furnace in the jungle in a Not the Bees world, where the stone to build one does not exist.

A Safe arrives once Skeletron is down, which lands right when a second storage container starts being worth the gold. Clearing any of the early bosses adds the drum kit. Hardmode opens the rest: full strength healing and mana potions, Gold Dust, a Disco Ball, and the Sharpening Station. The potions quietly convert your supply problem into a money problem, which is a good trade at that point in a run. The Sharpening Station is the one to plan around, since armor penetration for melee is otherwise awkward to come by.

His pylon line is the most valuable thing he sells and the most conditional. He only offers the one matching the biome he is standing in, and only while another NPC lives close enough to keep him company, so getting a forest pylon out of him means building him a neighbor rather than an isolated shack. He is content in the forest by default. He also likes the Golfer, for the obvious reason, and the Golfer does not reciprocate.

Left alone with an enemy he lobs knives at it, and his damage climbs as you clear bosses, so a merchant in a lit town is a small turret rather than a liability. He is still worth walling in during a Blood Moon. Replacing him costs nothing but time, and in the meantime you have lost the shop and the pylon.

• His line about an evil presence watching him is a readout, not flavor. It means the Eye of Cthulhu can now turn up on its own.
• He mangles the name Cthulhu during a Blood Moon, which is the joke: Lovecraft wrote it to be unsayable. He pronounces it correctly in one of his other lines.
• Dropping him in Shimmer swaps his sprite for an alternate look and changes nothing else. Doing it again puts him back.
• He talks constantly about goods he does not stock, including armor and umbrellas, and he will not give you a single copper for the dirt he keeps advertising.